The 3 big things in Spirit Tech this week

Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical calls for AI to be "disarmed," co-presented at the Vatican with Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah

"Magnifica Humanitas" (Magnificent Humanity), released May 25, is the Catholic Church's first doctrinal statement on AI: both a safeguard for our humanity at this pivotal moment and a guide for those building the technology. At the heart of the encyclical: human dignity does not depend on what we can do, on the wealth we hold, or on our position in life, but on the simple fact of being human. The question that follows for every AI system is whether it serves the dignity of the person using it, or whether it concentrates power, displaces meaningful work and reduces the person to a data point. Pope Leo XIV writes that the universal destination of goods, the Catholic teaching that the earth's resources belong to all of humanity, must also include "new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data," the same move his namesake Pope Leo XIII made in 1891 in writing a defence of workers' rights, when the industrial revolution concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a few. Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah stood beside the Pope at the release and spoke of "a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from inside, cannot," a frontier AI lab now partnering with a major spiritual institution on the moral governance of AI, rather than seeing them as a passive constituency. For Spirit Tech builders, the encyclical names the standard our work has long carried: that any technology touching the interior life must stand with the dignity, the meaning and the life of the person it serves. AI spiritual companions should expect to face explicit positioning questions against it within the year.

Oura shipped the world's smallest smart ring with a new Brain Health Study, while SOND exited stealth with $7M for a closed-loop sleep earbud

Oura Ring 5 launches June 4 at 6.09mm wide (40% smaller than its predecessor), with blood pressure signals, nighttime breathing monitoring, and week-long battery life. The accompanying Brain Health Study is Oura's first active cognitive-research program for US members; combined with the millions of existing Oura wearers already tracking sleep and HRV (heart rate variability) daily, it opens a path to what could become the largest contemplative-adjacent biometric dataset ever assembled. Days earlier, SOND, founded by Bose's former head of sleep products Yadid Ayzenberg and Google senior engineering manager Amir Lazarovich, exited stealth with $7M to launch Dreambuds: an in-ear system that reads 12 physiological signals during sleep and responds in real time with AI-coached audio interventions. SOND markets sleep coaching, not contemplative practice, but the closed-loop architecture it ships (real-time audio cues triggered by sleep-stage detection) is the substrate the contemplative sleep traditions have lacked at consumer scale: yoga nidra, dream yoga, lucid dreaming, and hypnagogic suggestion have each been waiting for hardware exactly like this. The Spirit Tech opportunity rests in the app layer.

A single dose of Compass Pathways' COMP360 psilocybin reduced chronic suicidal ideation in 70% of treatment-resistant patients by week 12

The open-label trial at Sheppard Pratt, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, enrolled 20 adults who had failed at least two prior antidepressant treatments (the "treatment-resistant" cohort is one of psychiatry's most difficult populations). Reductions in suicidal thoughts appeared within one week and held through the 12-week follow-up. The Spirit Tech layer is the structured protocol Compass wraps around the dose, preparation sessions before, supervised administration during, and integration sessions after, all delivered through COMP360's clinical platform: a working model for how technology-enabled psychedelic therapy can reach the most underserved patients at scale. Two weeks ago, the FDA granted Compass a rolling NDA submission (the formal application to bring the drug to market) for treatment-resistant depression; this week's data extends the evidence into chronic suicidal ideation, keeping COMP360 on a potential 2027 commercial timeline.